Lsherm:As a former mail administrator for a very large organization, there are multiple methods of dealing with this, but all of the easiest ones involve disabling the list for a few hours, or disabling its ability to send, then parsing through queued messages and deleting anything that's a reply-to the original subject line. If it's a true list, then people are just replying to one email address that distributes the email among list members.

Sounds like either someone was literally asleep at the switch or they just didn't give a fark.

We had something like this happen when I worked for Cox. Email went from the NE NOC and went across the country. Someone in CA hit reply-all 'I don't need to be on this mail list' Then every 2 seconds we got a dozen more emails from people that didn't need to be on the list. Took the admin's about 45 min to just say fk it and turn off the exchange server. Sure, not the best ways of doing it, but gets the point across.

Or have prior office experience, enjoy humor of various types....lots of reason really, but the important thing is that you found a way look down on others.

You suck at life in general

Awwww, such anger towards a stranger on the internet. You really should get outside more. I hear that gardening is therapeutic.

What an insensitive thing to say. whatshisname's girlfriend was killed by a drunk-driving landscaper.

Bane of Broone: skinink: SilentStrider: That happened at my company once. It was hillarious.

whatshisname: If you find that hilarious, you need to go outside more.

rfenster: I believe that you have the wrong rfenster. Please remove me from this list

rfenster: Unsubscribe

rebelyell2006: Easy way to stop that bullshiat: "The next person to reply-all will be fired."

Bane of Broone: whatshisname: If you find that hilarious, you need to go outside more.

Or have prior office experience, enjoy humor of various types....lots of reason really, but the important thing is that you found a way look down on others.

whatshisname: Bane of Broone: whatshisname: If you find that hilarious, you need to go outside more.

Or have prior office experience, enjoy humor of various types....lots of reason really, but the important thing is that you found a way look down on others.

You suck at life in general

Please unsubscribe me from this reply all thread of rudeness of whatshisname. Thanks.

Do we really have to be cc'd in all of this?

Oh sorry. I just meant for this to go to the mods. Please ignore this post. Have a good weekend! Skinink

How do I computer?

You do know there is a farker named Quel. I think that's the person you wanted.

Guys,I think someone should break the chain of email and start the subject over ...

I was told there would be no hot cocoa boxes.

Would someone please add Unobtanium and Pichu0102 to the proper mail list and remove them from the current one. Or take me of the cocoa sampler list. I am still waiting for my guiness towel update BTW Mentat.

This is called the idiot virus. The same thing happened some years back at a J&J company I worked at. The company was pretty much crippled for the day when some moran sent an e-mail to damn near everyone in J&J. I received over 11,000 e-mails in one day. It was absolutely maddening to see so many messages saying pretty much the same stupid thing, "...stop replying all!!!...", sent to everyone, and to not be able to respond since I didn't want to contribute to the problem. It made me want to go find someone who had replied and kill them.

Liinda:oukewldave: We have multiple email groups, but corporate seems to find the need to tell everyone in the whole company "news" about other locations that have nothing to do with us. Then the brown nosers need to reply all and make a comment about the email. Like if the email is saying this location had 6 months without an "incident", they would respond with "congratulations!!" and "keep up the great work!!". At least 10-15 people for the next 4 hours. Pretty annoying, and I'm new there.

At my company, when an exciting news or congratulatory email goes out to an entire department people are actually encouraged to reply all to acknowledge and encourage. It is so frustrating when 50 or more people are racing to be the first to congratulate the kudos email, then responding back and forth in a mass email orgy of unproductive back patting. Drives me crazy.

I also find it annoying as fark. These folks must have all been the overly gleeful cheerleader back in high school. I always want to reply, "if we are all done stroking ourselves can we now get back to work?". So far I haven't but someday when I am ready to retire I think I will.

2,745 emails in one hour. That's my record. And 90% of them were bounce backs saying some lady's email was no longer valid. It was part of a multi-country drug study, so a lot of the replies sent out weren't in English. I wasn't the cause of the problem, thank god, but I did spend quite a bit of time helping all my coworkers dump their emails. That was a total pain in the ass, but equally hilarious as this.

rebelyell2006:Easy way to stop that bullshiat: "The next person to reply-all will be fired."

The problem with that strategy is that people will reply before reading all of their messages. Reading my email in reverse chronological order has saved me a lot of time.

Ima4nic8or:It was absolutely maddening to see so many messages saying pretty much the same stupid thing, "...stop replying all!!!...",

As soon as it starts, set up a filter on your email to throw those emails straight into your trash can.

At at previous job, a girl wrote her coworker boyfriend an email with some suggestions about what they would be doing in the bedroom that evening, and then finished it off with some harsh statements about several her coworkers. Her boyfriend's last name started with "AL" and she didn't realize the "send to" field autofilled with our ALLUSERS distribution list. It was hilarious. She literally ran out of the office and was never seen again.

CSB: I inadvertently caused a situation like this while getting revenge on a back-stabbing co-worker. I snapped a picture of him sleeping on the job, chin drool and all, embedded it in an email and sent it company wide. Little did I know, I sent it to everyone in our parent company (also an oil company, but not as big as BP) and all of its subsidiaries. This was done semi-anonymously because we have to share an email account (so cheap they have a limited number of accounts). Why I have access to an email list that big is a mystery, I'm a lowly mechanic.My email caused a cascade like this for an hour or so but they snuffed it out. HR knew it was me that started it but let it slide, and the sleeping asshat was let go.

oukewldave:We have multiple email groups, but corporate seems to find the need to tell everyone in the whole company "news" about other locations that have nothing to do with us. Then the brown nosers need to reply all and make a comment about the email. Like if the email is saying this location had 6 months without an "incident", they would respond with "congratulations!!" and "keep up the great work!!". At least 10-15 people for the next 4 hours. Pretty annoying, and I'm new there.

I work for a large company with a global salesforce of about 900 people (this number includes management, sales engineers, account managers, account execs, etc). Sr and Exec Management in their infinite wisdom, have decided that every time a person makes a sale, upgrades or renews one of our couple thousand customers an email blast goes out to the entire global salesforce. To a certain degree I can appreciate seeing the sales that are made, it allows you to congratulate the person who made the sale...there is a from in SFDC that you fill out when you complete the sale that you have to put interesting info in such as what you did to close, challenges you encountered, what the customer business problem is...etc... It is helpful to a small degree.

All that being said, there is a group of about 80-100 people (brown nosers) who hit "reply all" on a very regular basis. It is annoying as fark. If there is a large enough sale...HO-LEE-SHIAT...there will be a few hundred "reply alls"

The reply all function on those types of emails ought to be disabled, and people ought to be fired for hitting that damn button. Totally and completely unnecessary action on their part.

I don't have to imagine it, Stubby, someone started a reply-all mailstorm and melted down my province's (government) servers about ten years ago. This idiot asked every email address in the province, and I'm not making any of this up, to borrow chairs for a meeting at his site. Eleven replied reply-alls (and one hour) later, the server died. Literally. According to the IT rumor mill, the server melted down so hard, it somehow managed to physically damage itself.

/ Two months later, someone came very close to starting a Canada-wide meltdown from the federal servers (which apparently included provincial all-users lists for every province.)

Unoriginal_Username:Lsherm: As a former mail administrator for a very large organization, there are multiple methods of dealing with this, but all of the easiest ones involve disabling the list for a few hours, or disabling its ability to send, then parsing through queued messages and deleting anything that's a reply-to the original subject line. If it's a true list, then people are just replying to one email address that distributes the email among list members.

Sounds like either someone was literally asleep at the switch or they just didn't give a fark.

We had something like this happen when I worked for Cox. Email went from the NE NOC and went across the country. Someone in CA hit reply-all 'I don't need to be on this mail list' Then every 2 seconds we got a dozen more emails from people that didn't need to be on the list. Took the admin's about 45 min to just say fk it and turn off the exchange server. Sure, not the best ways of doing it, but gets the point across.

We used to have a woman who would send an email every time someone accidentally an email to the whole department. She would send her email to the whole department requesting the sender of the first email retract his email. Then she didn't retract her unnecessary email to the entire department.

Liinda:We used to have a woman who would send an email every time someone accidentally an email to the whole department. She would send her email to the whole department requesting the sender of the first email retract his email. Then she didn't retract her unnecessary email to the entire department.

I think she got fired for some other dumb thing she did.

We had a woman like that on our tech staff and she was fired for being rude to everyone. I think she was suffering from an extreme case of OCD, but she was incapable of letting any perceived slight or disorganization go unnoticed. She would send email to management if you filled up your trash can. God help you if she could smell your deodorant (not Axe, just deodorant), or if you had a fan in your cube (fans gave her headaches). I used to have a hot pink umbrella (hey, it never got stolen) and she complained about it because it wasn't an "umbrella" color.

I was sooooooo happy the day they canned her. She made life miserable for everyone.

The problem was that a macro e-mail address, designed to send mail to everybody in the company, ended up being subscribed to some sort of listserv discussion. Replying to the listserv e-mail copied the response to everybody subscribed to the listserv, which included the magic group/macro e-mail address that would, in turn, send the new "entry" to everybody int he company. Rinse, Lather, Repeat.

We have these in my company... for example there is one that sends e-mails to everybody in a particular office building, or to everybody within an administrative group. What we don't have is a listserv that well automatically send out everything sent to it, out to everybody subscribed.

The group/macro e-mail address couldn't be unsubscribed by an individual, it's strictly an outgoing address. In other words, only an admin could unsubscribe the group e-mail address.

Lsherm:Liinda: We used to have a woman who would send an email every time someone accidentally an email to the whole department. She would send her email to the whole department requesting the sender of the first email retract his email. Then she didn't retract her unnecessary email to the entire department.

I think she got fired for some other dumb thing she did.

We had a woman like that on our tech staff and she was fired for being rude to everyone. I think she was suffering from an extreme case of OCD, but she was incapable of letting any perceived slight or disorganization go unnoticed. She would send email to management if you filled up your trash can. God help you if she could smell your deodorant (not Axe, just deodorant), or if you had a fan in your cube (fans gave her headaches). I used to have a hot pink umbrella (hey, it never got stolen) and she complained about it because it wasn't an "umbrella" color.

I was sooooooo happy the day they canned her. She made life miserable for everyone.

I used to supervise a woman like that. She was middle aged, unattractive, and perpetually irritable. There was a young, quite beautiful girl who pushed the dress code to the absolute limit. We had a daily routine. The young girl would come to work and intentionally walk by this lady. She'd stop whatever she was doing and come to my office and inform me that the girl was out of dress code. I'd have to take the girl along with a female witness to a back office and measure the length of her skirt. On the rare occasion she was a half inch out of dress code, she had a backup skirt in the car.

We had a great party when the irritable woman got married and moved to Alaska. She actually sent me an email once about the odor a lady left when using and exiting the restroom. I told her I wasn't sure what she wanted me to do since I didn't cook for the woman.

Pink umbrella is a great idea. My favorite pen came from the dollar store and has glitter and dangling sparkly pom poms. No one wants to borrow, much less steal it.

ttc2301: Nothing beats the time that one of our marketing geniuses emailed a 10M .pdf brochure to everyone in the company. The wailing didn't settle for several days until all of the VPN users had checked in.

/gateway only takes 2M now

I was at a company with a generous attachment limit, but the problem wasn't an internal storm. A guy auto-forwarded his e-mail to a personal account. That system had a lower limit, and it bounced a msg back for being too big. It included the attachment in the bounce msg, so when it got forwarded back again, it bounced again, etc. etc. Ping-ponged the server to death.

The worst was Valentine's Day. Hundreds of people -- if not a thousand -- would get e-cards and messages with huge cutesy graphics. Every year, it would drag the servers almost to a halt and delay mail for hours. Of course, IT got blamed for it, but they wouldn't let us filter out their love letters.

gerbilpox:I was at a company with a generous attachment limit, but the problem wasn't an internal storm. A guy auto-forwarded his e-mail to a personal account. That system had a lower limit, and it bounced a msg back for being too big. It included the attachment in the bounce msg, so when it got forwarded back again, it bounced again, etc. etc. Ping-ponged the server to death.

The dreaded mail loop. Newer systems are a lot smarter about it, but we used to run into that weekly. Someone would set up a forward rule to an account that already had a forward rule back to the original account, and they'd promptly generate a mail storm. Or the dreaded three or four account loop, which usually involved accounts they forgot they had, couldn't log into, but kept sending mail along its merry way regardless.